Land of the free, home of the crazed

Back in 2014, US Presidential hopeful and alleged dog-meat eater, Robert F Kennedy Jr. found a dead bear cub by the side of the road in upstate New York. RFK, as he’s commonly known by those who presumably want to forget he’s a Kennedy, decided to take the expired bear home for his gourmet road-kill freezer collection for later consumption. Unfortunately over the course of the weekend, Kennedy forgot about the dead bear cub he’d stuffed in his car boot – something that’s surely happened to all of us at some stage – and decided to take the by-then decomposing corpse back to New York City’s Central Park instead.

RFK arrived at Central Park in the dead of the night, arranging the dead baby bear just near a path and underneath the front of a bicycle he’d also brought along as part of the joke. Exactly what that joke was is difficult to determine and best left to professionals with experience in unhinged, privileged males with “brain worms”, but the scenario gives you a deeply penetrating insight into the scrambled mind of a man who just last week, was polling at around 5% in the 2024 US election.

That some Americans, even any Americans, actually supported RFK and intended to vote for him as President isn’t surprising to anyone who’s followed US politics closely over the years. This is a country at war with itself and its people. A polarised, dysfunctional, deeply divided nation that holds the right to own a gun over the right of their own children to sit safely in their schools. It’s a nation that once elected Donald Trump, and – god help us – could possibly elect him again.

Comparing Trump with RFK, it says something about the derangement of the US political scene that a man who played hide-and-seek with a bear corpse and believes Covid was genetically engineered “to attack Caucasians and Black people”, was only the second most bat-shit crazy candidate in the race.

The most bat-shit part of course, is the American presidential election “system”, and we use the word “system” here advisedly because to an outside observer, how it still operates this way is beyond comprehension.

Broadly speaking, the federal presidential elections are conducted by an Electoral College. This isn’t a place, it’s a process – a convoluted, unworkable election process that, just like the imperial system, has been abandoned by every democratic nation in the world bar the USA. This process to elect the US President arrived via Article II, Section 1, Clauses 2 and 3 of the US Constitution and the 1804, 12^th Amendment (and a few other pieces of band-aid legislation since then). The Electoral College was largely seen by the Constitutional drafters at the time as a compromise between electing the President by a vote of ordinary citizens, and electing the President via a vote in Congress. However, just like John Howard’s model of a potential Australian republic, the entire system has now developed into an unholy mess.

Unlike the Australian Electoral Commission – a statutory authority separate to government that oversees our federal elections – the USA has no uniform national electoral system, or an independent separate authority to run them. Instead, the federal elections are overseen and run by the individual states (and Washington D.C , which is like the USA’s version of the Australian Capital Territory, except Peter Dutton spends more time there).

Each of the 50 states, plus Washington DC, are allocated Electors (a member of the Electoral College) largely based on the size of their population. Officially, it’s proportionate to the state’s House of Representative members, plus 2 senators, but we’re already having trouble keeping up here, so let’s stick with population size. This is why California (pop. 39.1 million) has 55 Electors voting in the Electoral College to vote in the president, and little old Wyoming (pop. 600,000) has only 3. 

In the weeks after this year’s presidential election, a total of 538 Electors of the Electoral College will travel to their state capital to cast their vote on behalf of their state’s citizens’ votes. Got it? But how do American voters know their state Electors have cast their votes according to the voting results of their own state? They don’t. It’s just taken for granted that they do. In the 2016 election Hillary Clinton polled the most amount of votes across the country, but actually lost the election, and yes, the runner-up taking out the Presidential prize has happened several times before.

In addition, over the years the US has seen Republican-dominated states impose restrictions designed to suppress Democrat votes through numerous ways. They’ve changed ID requirements to disenfranchise poor and Black voters, eliminated polling booths in predominantly Democrat leaning or Black dominated areas causing voters to queue for anything up to 8 hours, and gerrymandered districts to force an inequitable distribution of Republican voters, just to name a few. 

And that’s not even taking into account the fact that in the US, unlike Australia, voting is not compulsory. Yes, in the land of individual rights and “Me Is Mightier Than We”, the US now has over 220 million people of voting age and only 161 million bothering to register to vote.

That’s why US politics is such a gloves off, open blood-bath. It’s why their party conventions are like something out of a Las Vegas drag queen’s nightmare. Americans need to be entertained and engaged to vote; they need to be dragged kicking and screaming into their own democratic process. While almost every state in the USA makes jury duty compulsory and a civic duty, they view voting for their national leader as just like bringing an umbrella – something optional and open to the vagaries of the weather.
It’s easy to see how the USA’s insane, aberrant election system is open to abuse by an insane, aberrant would-be dictator like Trump. He took full advantage of this in the 2020 election, refusing to concede, casting doubt on the mechanics of the Electoral College (easy to do) and easily convincing his cult-hypnotised supporters that none of the system was fair or just or even. Taking Trump’s delusions out of the equation, he probably has a point.

But after Kamala Harris’s swift rise to top the Democrat ticket, what we’re seeing now in the Presidential race in Trump is a man in the Fat Elvis stage of his campaign. Anybody watching the Democrat National Convention over the past week couldn’t help but notice the buoyant, Obama-like atmosphere in the air, as well as the fact there were far more Republicans at the Democrat convention than Republicans at the Republican convention.

That’s because Trump has hijacked the traditional Republican party, largely by offering power to those who crave it most – billionaires and politicians. Below him, Trump offers ordinary Americans citizens what they crave most; a belief that he alone will lead them out of their miserable lives and into something better. To the ones remaining, the hyped-up cookers with the painted faces, the red MAGA hats and the delusional grip on facts and reality, Trump offers them what they crave most – validation of themselves, not as mad outsiders, but as one of the team. It’s their longed for power and validation, simply by association.

What Harris offers in contrast is far more difficult to pin down. The fact she’s a highly educated, former prosecutor with years of career experience behind her and a formidable intellect, and Trump, well Trump does not, is the most obvious difference. But Harris’s campaign has a secret ingredient – normality.

Kamala Harris and her suburban dad, everyman running mate, Tim Walz, are two Americans who’ve worked in paid jobs, were raised in middle-class and working-class families and who, unlike Joe Biden, have had lives and careers outside of politics. Harris speaks like every mother, offering her children hope and joy and yes, stability. Trump speaks like fear and loathing are an inherent part of his outlook.

Trump represents chaos and division while Harris represents unification and normality. And in a political landscape where the nephew of a former president can campaign on the evils of vaccination and a 6 times bankrupt, maybe-billionaire can brag of overthrowing the election, and no American citizen is sure whether to vote or not and if they do, will their vote even count – unification and normality is sorely what a fractured, disUnited States of America needs.